Asset Based Community Development South Africa

Ikamva Youth Equips Young People For The Future

Young people are our future. This might sound cliché and self-evident. Still, the world is steadily heading towards a youth-centred age where large numbers of young people are increasingly coming to hold important positions of power and the public conversation. » Continue Reading

Welcome!

Welcome to the ABCD Hub – an online platform set up to support Asset Based Community driven Development (ABCD) especially in South Africa. The idea for the hub came from an ABCD Festival hosted by Ikhala Trust in November 2015 which brought together over 100 development practitioners to celebrate, showcase and share stories of community driven development. The hub is a space to share information, case studies, resources, methodology and experiences in asset based development. Ikhala Trust will sponsor the hub (through the generosity of CS Mott Foundation) over the next few months building up to its next ABCD Festival in November 2016. The uptake of the platform and its usefulness for practitioners will decide the next steps…

You Are Invited!

All practitioners who support an asset based approach are free to contribute resources, articles, case studies, reports and any other documentation or links that you think can be useful for others.

Let’s build the hub together…

What is ABCD?

Asset Based Community driven Development (ABCD) is an approach that appreciates the strengths, potentials and capacities that communities inherently have and how to unlock these. The term ABCD was coined by Kretzmann and McKnight (1993) who researched self organised communities and the critical success factors. They found that efforts are more effective and longer-lasting when community members dedicated their time and talents to creating the changes they desired (and not focusing on what is lacking).

Asset Based Community Development (or citizen driven development) offers an alternative to the conventional needs based approach. The needs based approach creates mental ‘problem maps’ and offers a skewed view of the community and can have a devastating impact on the psychology of local residents. Alternatively, asset based development rests on an understanding that sustainable development comes from within.

Assets include: stories, knowledge, innovations, talents, associations and networks, local institutions, physical assets and natural resources; financial resources; cultural assets; rights, claims and entitlements. The approach focuses attention on the strengths and capacities that communities already have and builds from there. The intention is to surface hidden “gifts”, grow a common vision and an appreciation from which to move forward.